Players take turns acting as the Mads, and set up experiments (through memorable Movie Moment cards from classic cheesy movies!) for the other players.
Players have a hand of Riff cards they can look through and choose the card they think:
Best responds to the Movie Moment.
The Mads would like the most.
Then they pass their Riff card face down to the Mads.
Players also have a set of 3 Betting tokens valued 1, 3, and 5. They choose one of these and place it face down in front of them when they submit their Riff card. The number they select is the amount of points they stand to win this turn. If you feel your Riff is strong, bet on yourself to earn higher rewards!
The Mads will shuffle and then read each submitted Riff one at a time, and eventually choose their favorite of the bunch.
Then, all non-Mads players flip over their betting tokens they picked for this experiment. Whoever submitted the card that the Mads picked earns that many points and advances their standee around the Scoreboard of Love on the game board. Each player’s chosen token is left face up in front of them and cannot be used again until they have used all three of their tokens.
There is a twist—
If the player who wins points in an experiment uses their 3 or 5 token, the Mads pick up on the BIG BRAIN ENERGY through their mind monitoring and get some data points as well, scoring 1 point from a 3, and 2 points from a 5 that won. They then move their standee on the score track.
Once that’s all done, the player with the Mads token passes it to the player on their left, each player refills their hand to 5 Riff cards, and they begin the next experiment. After all players have been the Mads, the round is over and the Round tracker is advanced.
The game is played over 3-4 rounds depending on your group size, with an Invention Exchange after the second round where you can swap out some cards in your hand for new ones. Whoever is the furthest on the score track with the most points at the end is the winner!
For the more adventurous players, we have included special Oversized Riff cards and dry erase markers to replace the Riff deck so that you can write in your own responses!
Also, the game is meant to be fully compatible with any movie. Simply leave those Movie Moment cards in the box, and your remote control becomes your Mads token! You and your friends choose a film to use for that game, and then the Mads player gets to pause the film after a good scene or worthy moment occurs on their turn. Play for a normal game length or the duration of the film!
COMBINE the two variants above! As close as you can get to a competitive version of MST3K!
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